Not normal at all. This was America’s 1932 Germany moment, there’s no going back now. 70 plus million of the dumbest Americans on the planet welcomed the Nazis with open arms.

Last I checked, Iroquois county had 9000 yes votes to secede. Good luck with that massive tax revenue base. Chicagoland’s 10 million plus residents will be happy to stop sending them money.

The media completely failed at their job of informing the public.

A democracy requires an informed citizenry, and the US media over the past eight years in particular created an increasingly misinformed citizenry.

When people are more concerned that a trans girl might play on a softball team than that the climate crisis might profoundly devastate the biosphere and much of life on it, human and otherwise, for the next 10,000 years, the media has failed. When people worry about crime when it is low, an economy when it is thriving and immigrants when they do much of the hard work that sustains that economy and commit fewer crimes than the native-born, the media has failed.

When it came to Donald Trump, they went easy on him, and they again and again let him and the far right set the agenda. They constantly treated asymmetrical issues as symmetrical ones – if the Democrats resisted Republican outrages, both sides were “polarized”. In the media everything had two sides, even if one side was the truth and the other was the lie, one side was the human rights or the law and the other side was their violation.

They went soft on Trump’s criminality and incompetence, and his sheer volume of scandals meant that the past ones were forgotten as the next one erupted. He would not have won his 2016 minority victory had the US news media adequately conveyed that Trump was not the fun fictional character in the reality TV show The Apprentice; he was a serially bankrupt man repeatedly accused of sexual assault with a lot of criminal ties and a history of not paying his bills, being helped on by the Vladimir Putin regime, which had itself seriously corrupted the information environment of the election.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/nov/07/us-progressive-election-trump-maga

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9542152/

In summary, we observed significant and consistent differences in dental caries experience in the primary dentition between Grade 2 children in Calgary (fluoridation cessation) and Edmonton (still fluoridated), Canada, 7‐8 years following cessation in Calgary. Our findings are consistent with an adverse impact of fluoridation cessation on children’s dental health in Calgary, and point to the need for universally, publicly funded prevention activities including, but not limited to fluoridation.

As long as I can remember, Republicans would inevitably crash the economy, Democrats would set it back on a good course (which of course takes a while), and the Republicans would go and crash it again. They got pretty good at timing the crash so it was right as they were leaving power.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/02/opinion/sunday/democrats-economy.html#

The full plan is detailed here: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/little-secret-trump-johnson-election/.

Basically, they just need enough States to withhold submitting valid slates of electors, which are due on Dec 11th. If that doesn’t happen, and it lowers the amount of electoral college voters enough so no single candidate has a majority, then the US House gets to decide.

In other words, we’re fully reliant on GOP controlled States doing the right thing. We’re fucked.

Damn dude, there’s not enough xanax in the world to help me cope with that mental image.

I found the NYT’s sanewashing of Trump irresponsible, so I took my WaPo subscription to The Guardian. It’s a sad reflection on the US when a foreign paper has better reporting than any domestic source.

Video of the pacing:

https://bsky.app/profile/bubbaprog.ilovecitr.us/post/3l6tb2nxfyo2o

This is a complete sanewashing article… Roberts read all the dissents, he knew exactly what he was doing. Putting Trump above the law.

My ideal weekend

Waterboard that bitch til it talks

Florida (desantis) recently enacted concealed carry, so I’ll be curious to see what law this nut actually broke.

I mean for me, just hearing him say he has “concepts of a plan” for the US healthcare system was enough for me. Get that monorail bill installed NOW.

Remember when NBC hired Kelly in 2017, she gave Putin a platform to spread his propaganda, she got demoted, and then eventually fired for racism? Who could have guessed that she was just another maga conspiracy nut?

And then I saw one of the Big Foots and the Big Foot looked at me.

At least we got this gem of a reply.

He’s going to be all right.